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Lecture Notes

Now that we've talked about the structure of the heart and the cardiovascular system, let's talk about the functions of the heart that are affected by improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness. Cardiac output is simply the amount of blood leaving the heart per minute, that's measured in liters per minute, and it's the product of stroke volume—or the amount of blood your heart pumps with each beat—and heart rate, the number of beats per minute. So you see the equation there below, cardiac output equals stroke volume times heart rate. How much blood is leaving your heart every minute? That's what you get for your cardiac output. We'll talk about adaptations to these components with improved fitness in the next few slides.